Fresenius Kabi is threatening legal action against a Danish professor after he and several colleagues recently published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine that concluded its hydroxyethyl starch treatment for sepsis may cause kidney failure and hemorrhages that may lead to patient death, ScienceNordic reports (here is the abstract). At the time the study was published in June, Anders Perner, a professor at the Intensive Therapy Clinic at the Copenhagen University Hospital, told ScienceNordic that “our results show that hydroxyethyl starch increases mortality rates by up to 17 percent in patients with severe sepsis, compared to treatment with a regular saline solution. This is a significantly increased risk, and the country’s intensive care units have stopped using this drug to treat sepsis.”